How Cognition saves 30 hours per week on bookkeeping and accounting tasks with Velo
Cognition is an applied AI lab creating end-to-end software agents that empower engineering teams to strive for more ambitious goals. Since launching in November 2023, the Peter Thiel-backed startup has already raised nearly $200M in venture capital and is currently valued at a staggering $2B.
Cognition's lean, engineering-heavy team needed a finance and accounting firm to establish a robust and scalable infrastructure
As one of today’s most promising venture-backed AI startups, Cognition knows how important a solid financial foundation is to its initial — and continued — success. Cash burn needs to be highly strategic.
As part of her role as Head of Operations, Salima Ghadimi ensures Cognition builds and maintains scalable financial systems. These tools and processes provide the team with insightful data, which in turn empowers leadership to make strategic decisions around talent management and research and development (R&D) investments.
Salima says that at inception, the engineering lab’s founders knew this would be a substantial time drain for her and the rest of Cognition's internal team. As they considered the challenge, they balanced two options:
1. Hire an in-house finance team: A risky play from a cost-benefit perspective, because Cognition needed more than just a CFO; it needed bookkeeping and accounting help, too. Not only would this option cost more, it would make the team less nimble than finding an external team that had a variety of skills and experiences.
2. Partner with an external team that involves accounting services and a fractional CFO: A more cost-efficient option that better aligned with the company's maturation plans. This solution would equip Salima’s team with expertise and assistance that far exceeded the scope of one or two in-house roles.
Velo’s full-stack financial services were exactly what Cognition needed.
“As an early-stage, high-potential startup, you can’t afford to get your financials wrong. You need to ensure all your accounting infrastructure is in place so that you have a sound foundation to build upon. Velo made creating that foundation simple.”
With Velo’s bespoke financial services, Cognition spends less time on financial management and more on innovation
From day one, Velo demonstrated a deep understanding of Cognition’s unique needs while introducing a variety of solutions to its challenges. From offering expert-level assistance in setting up tools and processes to organizing Cognition’s inflows, outflows, and subsequent data management, the partnership’s time to value was almost immediate.
“Tactically, we’re talking about bookkeeping, payables, financial reporting, the monthly close, payroll, exception handling, and more,” Salima says, smiling. “They helped us integrate our QBO instance and created an infrastructure to help us manage spend and track line items to analyze and then decide how to strategize more intelligently.”
Salima says that when Cognition's financial engine runs smoothly, other operational systems also thrive.
What Salima loves most, though, is having tireless, specialized eyes on the startup’s finances — without having an internal resource dedicated to that aspect of the business. Velo’s work allows Cognition’s AI engineers to devote more creative energy to innovation and proving their creations.
“Having a partner whose primary goal is to steward financial tasks — that’s the biggest benefit. It keeps us aligned, especially at an early stage company, where everyone wears a lot of different hats and fulfills a variety of roles.”
Cognition saves $200k annually on financial management while breaking new ground in AI
Cognition’s leaders are thrilled with their trajectory since, financially, all systems are humming along, producing reliable metrics.
And the results since our partnership began speak for themselves:
With Velo, Cognition has done more than avoid financial pitfalls — they’ve turned their accounting work into a value-add. Initiatives that used to require time and resources now produce valuable insights that effortlessly inform the trajectory of the business.
“Velo now has all the context. They know our company so well because they've seen our evolution since the very beginning. So when we create a year-end review, audit, or investor report, they'll clearly understand all that Cognition did and what we changed. That kind of institutional knowledge will continue to add value.”
